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Stephen King Going As Fast As He Can
Legendary author talks 'Ghost Brothers,' his new book 'Revival' and what he'd like to do with his epic 'Dark Tower' series
Mark Daniell - QMI Agency for TO Sun

At 67, author Stephen King is showing no signs of slowing down. This month alone he has the new book Revival – a Frankenstein-inspired horror – as well as the touring production of Ghost Brothers of Darkland County – a musical he developed with rocker John Mellencamp.

Earlier this year, King released Mr. Mercedes – his first detective novel – which came mere months after Doctor Sleep, his sequel to The Shining. If you add in his paperback-only Joyland, King has written four novels in less than two years.

Oh, and then there’s his screenplay for his newly-released dark drama A Good Marriage, based on a short story from Full Dark, No Stars.

"I know it seems like a lot of stuff, but it’s just in the last year-and-a-half that I’ve had several good ideas," King chuckles down the line from his home in western Maine. "I'm not overflowing with ideas like I was when I was 27, when they were all trying to escape my head at the same time. But I think I’m doing well if I’ve got one or two ideas ahead of me."

While King has had a steady hand when it comes to the worlds of literature and film, he was less sure about doing a musical, even if it was with Mellencamp.

Ghost Brothers (at Toronto’s Massey Hall Nov. 11) was over a decade in the making and King had reservations when he was asked to get involved.

"John got in touch with me in January of 2000," King recalls. "We had a mutual friend who told me, 'John would like to talk to you about an idea he has for a play.' I remember hearing that and thinking, ‘Okay, great. This'll be a loser.'"

But it was John Mellencamp, whom King says he respects, so he took the meeting.

The idea came from a story the Jack and Diane singer learned about at his cabin in Indiana.

"He'd heard about the cabin being haunted," King says. "The story was there were these two brothers who fancied the same girl. They were playing William Tell to show off to her and one brother shot the other in the head and killed him. The surviving sibling and the girl sped off, but smashed into a tree and they were killed also.

"So all three of them died; it was a clean sweep."

Mellencamp wanted to expand the idea into a southern gothic, Tennessee Williams-like play – with music.

King did an outline – which follows two sets of battling brothers – with Mellencamp sending CDs back to Maine. "He had caught the spirit of what I was writing and I got really excited," King says. "We fed each other."

Little by little, the play developed, he adds. "We took it to New York and got a chance to hear actors say the words and sing the parts and I got goosebumps."

Producer T Bone Burnett was brought in to help refine Ghost Brothers' musicality.

"When John came to me I said, 'John, I've never written a musical!' And he said, 'Steve, I've never written a musical either... we'll teach each other.'"

(http://jam.canoe.ca/Books/2014/11/06/ghost_brothers_general_press_1_credit_kevin_mazur410.jpg)
T Bone Burnett, John Mellencamp and Stephen King. Photo: Kevin Mazur

So while the project was out of King’s wheelhouse, he liked the idea of collaborating on an artistic endeavour that could develop organically. By the time it premiered in Atlanta in 2012, they had a play that scared audiences a little bit.

But before the decision was made to take the production out on the road, King was adamant that Ghost Brothers be something that could be mounted in "big towns and small towns," he says.

"I don't like Broadway productions that are these huge, multi-million dollar special effects events. Those are more like rides at Disney World than what I think of as the theatre. I wanted something that could be performed in Iowa or Toronto... that's what we have now."

The touring production of Ghost Brothers features Billy Burke (Twilight) and Gina Gershon (Bound).

King is already looking ahead to next year, with Finders Keepers (the sequel to Mr. Mercedes) out in June.

"And in the fall of 2015 there will be a new collection of stories called The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, which'll collect about 20 short tales. It should be a pretty fat book."

Fans can also expect to see King's own big screen adaptation of his apocalyptic novel Cell (with John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson, who also starred in an adaptation of King’s 1402). "I've seen early cuts for it and it’s really scary," he promises.

In the not too distant future, King says he'd like to revisit his seminal Dark Tower series and possibly write one more addition to his fantasy epic.

"The one thing that is missing in the books is The Fall of Gilead," he says.

"But I'd like to go back to all of them and revise the whole series because it’s really one book. I’m delighted people loved them, but I think of those books as a rough first draft of a very long novel. I’d like to go back and rewrite 'em all."

So it's literally, pedal to the metal.

"The thing is I feel really good now. For a long time I didn't because of my accident in 1999. A guy hit me with his van and it was a slow recovery. But once I started to feel good again, I started wanting to write again.

"It's been a productive time for me."

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